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Alex Pang, a visiting fellow at Microsoft Research Cambridge, actively researches this area. Pang proposes a new paradigm called contemplative computing. Today he gave a talk on the idea at the Lift France 2011 conference and has published a PDF of it. You can also find a rough draft of his paper on contemplative computing. So can computers actually help improve our concentration and contemplation, instead of leading us into distraction? The problem, as Pang puts it, is that "Technologies that were supposed to help us think better, work more efficiently, and connect more meaningfully with others now interrupt us, divide our attention, and stretch us thin."

One could feel a tiny bit bad for the person at Microsoft's British PR team who tweeted "Remember Amy Winehouse by downloading the ground-breaking Back to Black over at Zune." He or she must be having a terrible day. On one hand, it may have seemed like a sensible marketing move: The person was probably correct in thinking that people might want to remember the singer, who was found dead in London on Saturday, by listening to her music. On the other hand, it reads as an insensitive way for Microsoft to cash in on the tragedy surrounding the 27-year-old performer.

The iMedia 25: Brands Redefining Social Media list recognizes the brands that have done the best job of engaging consumers through the myriad social media platforms. But beyond mere engagement, these brands have used big ideas, bold action, and smart thinking to leverage passionate online audiences in a channel that is still quite new. Collectively, these are the brands that move, shape, lead -- and listen to -- the conversations that define social media.

Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they've either never done the work or have forgotten how it's done. These are the people who show up when your single best engineer casually and unexpectedly announces, "I'm quitting. I'm joining my good friend to found a start-up. This is my two weeks' notice." You call on the motivation and retention police because you believe they can perform the legendary "diving save". Whether it's HR or a well-intentioned manager with a distinguished title, these people scurry impressively. Meetings that go long into the evening are instantly scheduled with the disenfranchised employee. It's an impressive show of force, and it sometimes works, but even if they stay, the damage has been done. They've quit, and when someone quits they are effectively saying, "I no longer believe in this company". What's worse is that what they were originally thinking was, "I'm bored". Boredom is easier to fix than an absence of belief.

Multitaskers who think they can successfully divide their attention between the program on their television set and the information on their computer screen proved to be driven to distraction by the two devices, according to a new study of media multitasking by Boston College researchers.

And while many of them are hiring, they are increasingly picky. They are all looking for the same kind of people - people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value-adding jobs that technology can't, but also people who can invent, adapt and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever. Today's college grads need to be aware that the rising trend in Silicon Valley is to evaluate employees every quarter, not annually. Because the merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution means new products are being phased in and out so fast that companies cannot afford to wait until the end of the year to figure out whether a team leader is doing a good job.

Ben Nelson says the primary purpose of a university isn't to prepare students for a career. It's to prepare them for life. And he now has $70 million to prove his point. Nelson is the founder and CEO of a new experiment in higher education called Minerva Project. He says when it comes to learning, job training is the easy part. With the emergence of online courses, it's easier and cheaper than ever to acquire the hard skills you need to land a job. "Why would you spend a quarter of a million dollars and four years to learn to code in Python?" he says. "If that's the role of universities, you'd have to be insane to go to universities."

While this is an interesting article, i don't think it provides sufficient nuance to be useful. A person's ability to operate in a situation (their digital fluency, for example), the types of tasks that they are doing, and the intensity of the attention they need to apply in a situation should determine the degree to which they attempt to multitask. The more fluent people we've seen know when to shut down their laptop or crackberry when they know they won't be able to pay attention, and when the context calls for them to keep it open.

Does your company have a strategy? Freek Vermeulen doubts it. And he posits the five main reasons why, too often, a firm's strategy is nothing more than a pipe dream.